The scenes and events in “Newlywed” are mostly autobiographical. My wife and I spent the first year of our marriage in a small town in East Texas, during the last year of the twentieth century. I wanted to capture some details of the setting, culture and lifestyle that we experienced, which was both strange and wonderful. Hopefully readers who have not spent any time in East Texas will find some universal elements in the poem which they can relate to, and perhaps some aspects of the poem will also seem quite foreign and intriguing.

Nathanael O’Reilly was born in Warrnambool & raised in Ballarat, Brisbane and Shepparton; he now resides in Texas. He is the author of Distance (2014) and the chapbooks Suburban Exile (2011) and Symptoms of Homesickness (2010), all published by Picaro Press. He is the recipient of an Emerging Writers Grant from the Australia Council. Over one hundred of his poems have appeared in journals & anthologies around the world, including Antipodes, Australian Love Poems, Blackmail Press, Cordite, fourW, LiNQ, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Prosopisia, Red River Review, Snorkel, Social Alternatives, Tincture, Transnational Literature, Verity La and Windmills.